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Ray Bradbury

News about Ray Bradbury, including commentary and archival articles published in The New York Times. More

Ray Bradbury, 1920 — 2012

Ray Bradbury was a master of science fiction whose lyrical evocations of the future reflected both the optimism and the anxieties of his own postwar America.

Mr. Bradbury died on June 5, 2012, at the age of 91.

His most famous novel is “Fahrenheit 451,” published in 1953. Named for the temperature at which paper ignites, the novel depicts a near-future society in which firemen don’t extinguish fires but instead burn books, and where the complacent populace, numbed by nonstop television and advertising, seems all too eager to embrace enforced ignorance.

By many estimations Mr. Bradbury was the writer most responsible for bringing modern science fiction into the literary mainstream. His name would appear near the top of any list of major science-fiction writers of the 20th century, beside those of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein and the Polish author Stanislaw Lem.

In Mr. Bradbury’s lifetime more than eight million copies of his books were sold in 36 languages. They included the short-story collections “The Martian Chronicles,” “The Illustrated Man” and “The Golden Apples of the Sun,” and the novels “Fahrenheit 451” and “Something Wicked This Way Comes.”

Though his work never won a Pulitzer Prize, Mr. Bradbury received a special Pulitzer citation in 2007 “for his distinguished, prolific and deeply influential career as an unmatched author of science fiction and fantasy.”

The citation described him as “one of those rare individuals whose writing has changed the way people think.’'

“The Martian Chronicles” became a staple of high school and college English courses, an achievement not without irony; Mr. Bradbury disdained formal education. He went so far as to attribute his success as a writer to his never having gone to college.

Instead he read everything he could get his hands on, by authors including Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Thomas Wolfe and Ernest Hemingway. He paid homage to them in 1971 in the autobiographical essay “How Instead of Being Educated in College, I Was Graduated From Libraries.” (Late in life he took an active role in fund-raising efforts for public libraries in Southern California.)

Mr. Bradbury started his literary career as the self-publisher of the fanzine Futuria Fantasia when he was 18. The fanzine’s four issues were anthologized and reissued in 2007 by Graham Press. The fanzine was bankrolled by Forrest J. Ackerman, one of science fiction’s greatest fans and the man said to have coined the term sci-fi; only 100 original copies were printed. They contain early work by such future science fiction luminaries as Hannes Bok and Robert Heinlein.